Colorist Aurora Shannon, based at Company 3’s Vancouver studios, enjoyed collaborating with the makers of the military rescue film Valiant One, particularly where she used her color grading tools to imbue scenes that had to be shot under extremely harsh sunlight with the stormy overcast look called for by the story.

The directorial debut of Producer Steve Barnett (300), Valiant One stars Chase Stokes (Outer Banks) and Lana Condor (To All the Boys) in a nail-biting story of heroism in the face of mortal danger, which is set in motion when a US helicopter flying over South Korea is forced down north of the DMZ. Now, the survivors, trapped in North Korean territory, must work together to protect a civilian technical specialist and find their way out without being able to expect any US military support. Cinematographer Daniel Stilling brings a dramatic look and a feeling of immediacy to the images.

The production shot Vancouver for North Korea, which should have given the filmmakers the kind of overcast look the story required since a rainstorm causes the helicopter to fly off course and crash in the first place. “However,” Shannon notes, “when they came to shoot in BC, it was in the middle of a raging heat wave, complete with forest fires,” not at all the look they’d hoped for.

Shannon and Stilling knew that the footage, with its abundance of color and severe contrast, with bursts of direct sunlight pushing through the trees, would need to be tamed to look as though there was cloud cover intensely diffusing that sunlight. This work began in the dailies grade. Dailies Colorist Richard Cordes and the cinematographer created a custom show LUT within Red Creative Toolkit to create a stark, contrasty but significantly desaturated look. This enabled Barnett, Stilling, and other department heads on set to get a good general idea of where the look would wind up.

Shannon felt that the resulting imagery through this LUT accomplished many of the filmmakers’ goals for establishing the look. Then, she subsequently worked with them to finetune the imagery shot-by-shot for the final grade. She explains by pulling back a bit on the effect of the LUT, “that gave the freedom to augment the saturation and the blacks somewhat. We wanted the final color to go in the same direction as the dailies but slightly gentler.”

On the other end of the grayscale, Shannon spent much time suppressing the highlights to help along the “gloomy, overcast” look. “A section is set in a forest,” Shannon says, “which is supposed to be in the aftermath of a storm, but it had blistering highlights.” She’d finetune the strength of the LUT and then build luma keys on top of it to isolate and reduce the brightness of those highlights, and then she’d add shapes (Power Windows in DaVinci Resolve) to isolate and refine the look on top of those corrections. Every small change in part of a shot can sometimes require additional adjustments to make everything feel accurate and unaltered.

She also utilized Resolve’s HDR grading tools to finetune her selections further. “They’re called HDR Tools, but you don’t have to be in HDR,” she elaborates, noting she first graded in the D-Cinema space P3. “The tools are great at giving me more individual control over specific attributes in far more minute detail than you can get just isolating parameters such as lift, gamma, and gain or shadows, mid tones, and highlights. That was hugely useful here.”

As with so much of the colorist’s work, Shannon was scrupulous about retaining color in skin tones. “It was a question of where are we going to allow more of the color to come through? Are we going to put it back into just the skin tones? In most cases, it’s essential for skin to look at least somewhat realistic since viewers are so used to seeing what people’s skin tone looks like. But then, if we leave everything but the skin tones with the lower saturation look, that could have looked unnatural and distracting. So, we used the skin tones as a thermometer and then finetuned everything else so that it looked more natural while retaining the stark, low-saturation feel the filmmakers knew they wanted from the get-go.

“The final look isn’t something you can get with some kind of overall adjustment,” Shannon adds. “We did a lot of work on the individual shots, using keys and the HDR wheels to ensure that the skin and everything else reflected the strong, lower saturation look the filmmakers were after but where skin tones felt real, and nothing felt manipulated. It was a lot of work,  particularly because it’s set in a forest and characters constantly move in and out of shadow, but I’m very happy with what we accomplished!”

Valiant One is available to rent or own on digital. For more information about the film, click here.